We evaluate official saving rate measures in light of the recent decline of NIPA personal saving to effectively zero. We find, like others, that official saving measures are not representative of basic economic concepts, and that various adjusted measures of saving have moved in markedly...

We use repeated cross-sections of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to study the effect of self-reported transitory income shocks on household food spending. The self-reported shocks in the SCF are derived from survey questions about the gap between actual and "normal" income. This approach...